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Kulenkampff's 1936 Beethoven Violin Concerto set the standard for years Coupled with his late recording of the Brahms Double with Mainardi & Schuricht in wonderful new transfers
Notes on the recordings: As the Gramophone reviewer noted, the 1936 Telefunken Beethoven recording played considerably sharp - at 78rpm the average pitch of the recording was A=456.57Hz. Here it is offered at concert pitch, A=440Hz. Some of those Telefunken sides were exceptionally long, resulting in considerable treble loss at the end of some sides. As my aim here has been to preserve as much top end as possible, this will be apparent in one or two places. Likewise the listener will hear a slightly raised level of hiss, left in order to preserve as much as possible of Kulenkampff's superb upper tone. If it seems unfair to put a mid-30s German recording up against Decca's superb 1947 ffrr recording of the Brahms, well the Telefunken certain stands up well, even without the extended frequency range of the later recording. The Decca recording was Kulenkampff's penultimate session for the company, and may well have been his final orchestral studio recording - he was to go on to record three sonatas with Solti at the piano the following summer, just weeks before his untimely death. The Beethoven recording was naturally very reverberant, and I have not added to this. By contrast, the Brahms seemed excessively dry, and a small amount of convolution reverberation has been added to compensate for this - in the absence of a suitably Swiss acoustic space I've used the fine sound of Birmingham Symphony Hall, England, albeit very sparingly. Andrew Rose
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Georg Kulenkampff notes from Wikipedia
Georg Kulenkampff (23 January 1898 - 4 October 1948) was one of the world's most prominent concert violinists, one of the best-known German virtuosi of the 1930s and 1940s. Widely considered one of the finest violinists of the 20th century, Kulenkampff was known for his interpretations of works from the Romantic period. Kulenkampff gave the premiere performance of Robert Schumann's violin concerto and made the first recording of the piece; additionally, his performances of the violin concertos of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Glazunov, and Bruch are considered among the finest on record. Only the fact that his recording career coincided with the Nazi era, coupled with his early death from encephalitis, has prevented his name from being better known to modern listeners. Georg Kulenkampff was the son of a well-to-do merchant family in Bremen. He took an interest in the violin from a very young age, and from 1904 (aged 6) began to receive instruction from the concertmaster of the Bremen Philharmonic Orchestra, and afterwards with its conductor Ernst Wendel. He then received lessons and much encouragement from Leopold Auer (teacher of Mischa Elman, Efrem Zimbalist, Nathan Milstein and others) in Dresden, and made a concert debut in 1912 as solo violinist. On Auer's recommendation he was sent to study with Willy Heß at the Berlin Music Hochschule and became director of the Hochschule Orchestra. Kulenkampff suffered health problems in his young life, and towards the end of the First World War he returned to his home town to become concert-master of the Bremen Philharmonic Orchestra. However he made rapid progress, especially as a soloist, and in 1923 he became a professor-in-ordinary at the Berlin Music Hochschule. He taught there until 1926, when his solo career became all-absorbing, but resumed teaching there in 1931 until his departure from Germany in 1944. At the same time he gave concerts throughout Germany and, increasingly, in various parts of Europe, and had a busy broadcasting career. In 1927, he performed the Bach Double Violin Concerto in D minor with Alma Moodie (a student of Carl Flesch) and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (BPO) In 1935 he formed a very celebrated trio with the pianist Edwin Fischer and the cellist Enrico Mainardi, in which he remained active until 1948. At his death he was replaced as violinist by Wolfgang Schneiderhan. He also played in piano duos, especially with Georg Solti and Wilhelm Kempff: with Solti he recorded the Brahms sonatas, Mozart's 20th sonata and Beethoven's Kreutzer sonata (No. 9) (all Decca), and there is also a Kreutzer with Kempff (DGG, 1935). His (Decca) recording of the Brahms Double Concerto with Mainardi, under the baton of Carl Schuricht, is distinguished. In 1937 he was particularly associated with the premiere of the rediscovered Violin Concerto in D minor of Robert Schumann, which had been studied and suppressed by Joseph Joachim, but which Kulenkampff now revived with the help of George Schunemann and Paul Hindemith, whose own compositions were already banned by the Nazi authorities. The addition of this work to the repertoire was a very important and successful affair, and soon afterwards Kulenkampff made the world premiere recording of it, still considered authoritative. His pre-war recordings of the Beethoven (BPO under Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt) and Mendelssohn concerti are also considered outstanding: he maintained the Mendelssohn in performance despite the ban on his music, and used the cadenzas of Fritz Kreisler. Kulenkampff gave various other world premieres, notable of works by Ottorino Respighi (Violin Sonata No. 2) and by Jean Sibelius. He was very much in demand and very busy during the Nazi period, as an "Aryan" musician, though he did not subscribe to the racial theory and, by virtue of his importance as a German performer, was able to maintain proscribed parts of the repertoire. In 1940 he moved to Potsdam, and in 1944, with increasingly unsatisfactory demands from the prevailing powers, he left Germany for Switzerland. From 1943 there is a legendary live recording from Berlin of a performance of the Sibelius concerto conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler with the BPO. From Switzerland he continued to develop his international solo career, and he became successor to Carl Flesch at the Conservatory in Lucerne. He was first violin in the Kulenkampff Quartet from 1944. Among his students was Ruggiero Ricci. Kulenkampff died in Schaffhausen, Switzerland of encephalitis (spinal paralysis) at the age of only 50, suffering a rapid onset soon after his last concert. His writings appeared posthumously in 1952 under the title, 'A Violinist's Observations' (Geigerische Betrachtungen).
Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Kulenkampff
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